The following excerpt was taken from the rewrite of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes
The Love House Hotel was infested with roving herds of frightening aging transvestites and their shifty looking tricks. The ‘girls’ there were some pretty surreal creatures. Like a bunch of pot-bellied truck drivers stumbling around the narrow maze of dark halls in their ratty, cum-stained lingerie. Too destitute to ever dream of getting real breast implants, some of them had reputedly resorted to injecting themselves somehow with industrial truck tire silicone pilfered from the flat repair joints in the neighborhood. Or so the stories went…
Outside Narcisa’s window there, a long winding mosaic staircase led up into the crooked maze of Santa Teresa, the rundown old colonial bairro in the hills surrounded on all sides by its teeming, crime-infested favelas — the everpresent rambling hillside shanty towns. Right at the bottom of the stairs just across from the flop house there was a notorious little open-air bar. That place was like the unofficial borderline between the asphalt world of the city and the lawless underworld other city within the city; The world of the
favelas where all the usual urban street codes and social norms were automatically and drastically reversed, replaced with slum world codes, unwritten, inflexible and deadly — strange random laws rigidly enforced by packs of machine gun-toting teenaged bandidos. Minions of the shadowy Donos, the Drug Bosses, the only de facto government up there in those endless ghettos sprawling like a human cancer of septic poverty across the once verdant hills of the city of my youth.
That shabby outdoor boteco below Narcisa’s window at the Love House Hotel was also a well known distribution point for drugs. All kinds of unsavory characters gathered around the pool tables and rickety wooden stools there at all hours of the day and night, drinking, smoking weed, dancing and sniffing cocaine in paranoid little clusters at the end of the dirty clamorous bar. Samba and Forro music blasted constantly from big weather-damaged speakers in a surreal pounding blurry muddle of perpetual noise, a constant blaring soundtrack for the many loud arguments and heated discussions raging in that marginal netherworld of petty crime and sleepless vice.
In the pre-dawn hours there, the boisterous barroom debates raging beneath Narcisa’s window would slowly escalate, steadily rising in crescendo like a chaotic pounding doomsday symphony, often culminating in a pop of gunshots, bottles falling off the rickety tables, breaking like crashing cymbals as the bar’s ragged denizens scrambled like giant rats for cover.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009
Overwhelming and wonderful.
THANK YOU.